German Historical Institute London Bulletin Vol 25 (2003), No. 1
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German Historical Institute London Bulletin Volume XXV, No. 1 May 2003 CONTENTS Seminars 3 Article Secularization: German Catholicism on the Eve of Modernity (Rudolf Schlögl) 5 Review Articles The Never Ending Story: The Unbroken Fascination of the History of the First World War (Sven Oliver Müller) 22 Carl Schmitt: Relevance and Ambivalence (Dirk Blasius) 55 Ideas, Contexts, and the Pursuit of Genocide (Mark Roseman) 64 Book Reviews Guenther Roth, Max Webers deutsch-englische Familiengeschichte 18001950 mit Briefen und Dokumenten (Sam Whimster) 88 Olaf Blaschke (ed.), Konfessionen im Konflikt: Das zweite konfessionelle Zeitalter zwischen 1800 und 1970 (Helmut Walser Smith) 101 Björn Biester, Der Innere Beruf zur Wissenschaft: Paul Ruben (18661943). Studien zur deutsch-jüdischen Wissenschafts- geschichte (Dorothea McEwan) 107 Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (eds.), Heimat-Front: Militär und Geschlechterverhältnisse im Zeit- alter der Weltkriege (Matthias Reiß) 112 (cont.) Contents Kai Artinger, Agonie und Aufklärung: Krieg und Kunst in Großbritannien und Deutschland im 1. Weltkrieg (Jay Winter) 125 Arnd Bauerkämper (ed.), Britain and the GDR: Relations and Perceptions in a Divided World (Hermann Wentker) 127 Conference Reports Murder and Monarchy: Office and Tyrannicide in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Robert von Friedeburg) 133 Monarchy and Religion: The Transformation of Royal Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Michael Schaich) 141 Noticeboard 156 Library News Recent Acquisitions 168 2 SEMINARS AT THE GHIL SUMMER 2003 6 May PROFESSOR MANFRED GÖRTEMAKER (Potsdam) The Decline of the GDR and the Role of the Government of the FRG Manfred Görtemaker is Professor of Modern History at the University of Potsdam. His research interests cover German and European history in the nineteenth and twentieth cen- turies, and the history of international relations. His most recent publications include Geschichte Europas 1850-1918 (2002) and Kleine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (2002). At present he is Guest Professor at St Antonys College Oxford, where he is working on a project entitled Britain and Germany in the Twentieth Century. 13 May DR ALARIC SEARLE (Munich) The Wehrmacht on Trial: The Prosecution of Former Gen- erals, Vergangenheitsbewältigung and Public Opinion in the FRG, 1948-60 Alaric Searle is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Munich. His interests include Western European, Russian, and American military histo- ry, international relations, the history of the secret services in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and theories and methods of historiography. His PhD thesis, Wehrmacht Generals, West German Society and the Debate on Rearmament, 1949-1959, will be published this year. 27 May DR BRENDAN SIMMS (Cambridge) Eighteenth-Century Britain: A German Power Brendan Simms is Newton-Sheehy Teaching Fellow at the Centre of International Studies at Cambridge University, where he lectures on International History Since 1945. His research interests encompass Central European history dur- ing the Napoleonic period, Anglo-German relations after 3 Seminars unification, and the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo. He is currently editing a volume entitled The Primacy of Foreign Policy in German History, and working on a study of British foreign policy in the eighteenth century, New Worlds and Old Balances. His most recent publication is Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (2001). Seminars are held at 5 p.m. in the Seminar Room of the GHIL. Tea is served from 4.30 p.m. in the Common Room, and wine is available after the seminars. 4 ARTICLE SECULARIZATION: GERMAN CATHOLICISM ON THE EVE OF MODERNITY* by Rudolf Schlögl Anyone examining the religious journalism, theological reflection, and pastoral-theological reassurances of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century can appreciate the depth of uncertainty among those who had power in the church and among the clerical virtuosi of religion. The large gap separating the educat- ed and moneyed classes from the church and religion was clear, but even among the lower classes, indifference towards the church, igno- rance in matters of faith, and, at best, a superficial, purely habitual piety were apparent. The collapse of the legal and economic institu- tional structure of the Catholic Church in the Holy Roman Empire which took place between 1803 and 1814 thus seemed to presage the imminent end of Catholicism. And from the Lutheran perspective it seemed doubtful whether Protestantism would be able to assume the mantle. Since Woellners religious edict of 1788, Lutheranism, too, had witnessed a stream of complaints about the decay of religiosity and church discipline, and the destruction of traditional religious beliefs among Lutheran Christians.1 This discourse was first of all a reaction of theologians, virtuosi of * Trans. by Angela Davies, GHIL. This article is based on a lecture given at the GHIL in Oct. 2002. A longer version of this article has been published in Walter G. Rödel and Regina E. Schwerdtfeger (eds.), Zerfall und Wiederbeginn: Vom Erzbistum zum Bistum Mainz (1792/971830). Ein Vergleich. Festschrift für Friedhelm Jürgensmeier (Würzburg, 2002), pp. 6382. References here have therefore been kept to a minimum. 1 Cf. e.g. Joseph von Görres, Athanasius, ed. Heinz Hürten (Paderborn, 1998), p. 89; Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Dechristianisierung: Zur Problemgeschich- te eines kulturpolitischen Topos, in Hartmut Lehmann (ed.), Säkularisierung, Dechristianisierung, Rechristianisierung im neuzeitlichen Europa: Bilanz und Per- spektiven in der Forschung (Göttingen, 1997), pp. 3266, at pp. 3740. 5 Article religion, and lay people of all Christian confessions to the seculariza- tion projects of secular rulers. Even in ecclesiastical electoral states, it was considered both rational and pious from the 1770s on to dissolve monasteries in order to provide a better basis for a university. Beyond this, however, these writings articulated the observation that the world was entering a new relationship with the church and reli- gion. This produced changes in religious institutions as well as in the pious practices of believers, which amounted to a fundamental change in the shape of religion. Thus from the perspective of religion itself, notions such as secularization or de-Christianization summed up the fact that the relationship of the world to religion was clearly changing. To speak of secularization, therefore, is initially to take a religious perspective on the world in order to find out what religion might look like from the other sidefrom the world.2 That is why this discourse did not remain purely a lamentation. Friedrich Schleier- macher, who paradoxically adopted precisely this internal perspective by imitating an external perspective in his Über die Religion, did not consider that the state of religion in 1799 was such as to cause anxiety. I do not join with most people in claiming the decline of religion, he wrote, for I do not know of any other period that would have accept- ed it better than the present.3 Novalis, too, saw in the anarchy of con- temporary upheaval a time of revival for the religion of a united Christendom when, in the same year of 1799, he wrote Die Christen- heit oder Europa.4 And a third text dating from 1799 springs to mind: the letter to Dorothea written by Friedrich Schlegel who converted to Catholicism only a few years later. In it he explained to his beloved that religion was the best way for women to shape an undivided per- sonality for themselves which, in Schlegels words, lives and writes in a divine way.5 In other words, he saw religion as an education that 2 Cf. Niklas Luhmann, Die Religion der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt/M., 2000), pp. 27885. 3 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern, ed. Günther Meckenstock (Berlin, 1999), pp. 55 (quotation), 57 f., 63, 109 f., 119. 4 Novalis, Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs, vol. ii, ed. Hans Joachim Mähl and Richard Samuel (Munich, 1978), pp. 743, 7457. 5 Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Fragmente (17981801), vol. ii, ed. Ernst Behler and Hans Eichner (Paderborn, 1988), pp. 1725 (quotation at p. 175). 6 German Catholicism on the Eve of Modernity allowed people to find themselves in the profanity of a splintered bourgeois society, and revealed to them their divinity. These texts express confidence in the future importance of a reli- gion that had proved itself as a medium in which Bürger had been able to develop their individuality, and as a remedy against the suf- fering of an existence which bourgeois society had split up into dif- ferent spheres of value and areas of activity. Conversely, however, these texts also express the insight that this was the path of the fault lines that were opening up between the modern world and a church- based piety which aspired to be the crucial and all-shaping perspec- tive on the world and life. In his Athanasius (1837), Joseph Görres warned that he feared that the Rhinelanders, otherwise so pious, would forget the higher things in the face of all the economic and political activity.6 Much of the present-day scholarly energy devoted to researching the concept of secularization concentrates on demonstrating that it is inappropriate because every de-Christianization has been followed by a religious revitalization, as illustrated in particular by the Catholic revival of the nineteenth century.7